And so are you. On average.

by Emily Willingham  

[reposted for Mother’s Day] Before I became pregnant, I selected, with considerable calculation aforethought, a tall man to be my children’s father so that if our offspring were sons, they’d have that height advantage that some article I read somewhere online told me that height gives to men. But because great leaders from Alexander the Great (allegedly) to Napoleon (not actually short for his time) to Mahatma Gandhi were not really that tall, I hedged my bets by being a little on the shortish side myself. My children are all boys, two tall, one of average height, so clearly, I called that one perfectly and split the difference.

Not really. When I met the man who, 9 years later would become the father of my first child, I just thought he was a babe.

I did split the difference in other, possibly more genuinely calculated ways. In pregnancy one, I drank no caffeine at all. In pregnancy two, I started in on the Barqs root beer, with half the caffeine of a regular soda! By my pregnancy with our third child, I was a regular at Starbucks because, well, I was 38 years old for God’s sake, and I had two children under age six. I was tired. I needed drugs. Thus, on average, my caffeine consumption during pregnancy was quite modest overall. Perfect.

Depending on whom you listen to, you should have your baby at home with only a tree in attendance, fully expressing yourself as a woman of power and nerve and the world’s most flexible cervix. Or, if you follow the anti-homebirth folk, you should have your baby in the hospital, taking advantage of all of the conveniences modern medicine has to offer, from epidurals to awesome hospital gowns to interventions to boost your labor and get that baby out ASAP. Our first was born in a horrible, floodlighted delivery room full of screaming strangers with every intervention you can possibly imagine and some considerable and unnecessary trauma inflicted on him. Our middle son was born at home with a certified nurse midwife in attendance and a hospital nearby, on his due date, in the easiest, most straightfoward birth a human could have. And our third was born in a quiet, dark hospital room with only the OB and his father present, his mother feeling no pain from the lumbar down (woohoo!), and recovery in the same room for us all. On average, see, our birth experience was just perfect.

As you might have heard, you must breastfeed your child until age four or so if you’re really mom enough because drinking formula will make your child an overweight, unemployed, depressed adult (I read that online somewhere). Or, if you visit some “mommy boards,” you’ll learn that screw it, breastfeeding is hard and it hurts and dammit, formula is what’s right for me. Yeah. We split the difference. There was breastfeeding up to almost a year in one case, and none whatsoever in another, in which one of our sons simply was unable to do so. So I breastfed, formula fed, pumped and fed, pumped, froze, thawed, and fed, mixed pumped with formula and fed, and possibly occasionally just handed the child whatever liquid was within reach, which by the third child might conceivably have been wine or vodka. But on average, we nailed the target 6 months of breastfeeding because, you see, I am the perfect mother.

Some people-grandma, attachment parents, hippies, pediatricians-might tell you not to give your child a paci, offering up various suspect rationales. The information was so mixed that to achieve perfection, we let one of our children use his paci until he was almost four and another until he was about two, and then a third son didn’t use a paci at all. So, on average, our paci score was pretty much perfect, at least by the yardstick of “occasional use.”

I read somewhere online (always a reliable source) that babies, when they do start solid foods (a whole ‘nother subject), shouldn’t have anything but organics or they will be obese autistic asthmatics with ADHD, mommy issues, and a third nipple (or something like that). Our oldest, when he started solids, consumed 49 jars of organic baby food a week. Not only that, but we bought them at Whole Foods, religiously, every Sunday. Amen. Our middle son had a different experience, one that involved not eating all of his meals at home in his first two years, so his organics consumption was somewhat … decreased. And our youngest son couldn’t eat most foods and wouldn’t eat even more than that, limiting him to Goldfish crackers, strawberries, and the occasional hotdog. In other words, not only did this child have no organics, he had almost no plants at all, and barely ate anything that qualified as “food.” But I also read somewhere online that the label ‘organics’ is just misleading me and taking my whole paycheck because they’re covered in pesticides, too, and don’t do anything special nutrient-wise. Given that, looks like if you split the difference across all three of our children, on average, we did just fine with a mixed diet of organic and conventionally farmed (or, well, processed) food. Perfect.

Circumcision was another question. The information was so mixed, we ended up just having each of our sons halfway circumcised. I’m kidding. That’s not what we did.

And then there were the vaccines. I read somewhere back in 2000, when I was pregnant with our first, that they might cause autism (they don’t). Handily enough, our oldest got sick enough with the periodic upper respiratory virus that at many of his vaccine due dates, he couldn’t get his shots because he had the sniffles or a fever. So without even trying, thanks to the viruses, we followed a spread-out vaccine schedule, including a delayed MMR. And … he’s autistic. Our other sons have received vaccines generally on schedule. They are not autistic. We think all of our children are wonderful, so clearly, we made the perfect decision here, too.

Attachment parenting philosophy at its most extreme tells us to strap our children on and literally attach them to us day and night. Not a single one of our children was interested in being worn-not in front, not in back, not on the hip, not on the head-so when it came to attachment, we were pretty much total failures. Cry-it-out dictates that your child learn to self soothe by way of your adhering to a specific schedule of feeding and sleeping, child’s protestations notwithstanding. That was not an option for us (see, for example, “autistic,” above), so we’re total cry-it-out failures, as well. Oddly enough, all of our children slept a lot and pretty predictably from about age 4 months. So, perfect. But that’s probably on them.

Parents these days. They’re hovering helicopters or ranchers fielding free-range children, depending on what you read online. I’m just lazy enough to let my children wander out of my sight only long enough to later require stitches over the eyebrow (two incidents), split open a friend’s scalp (once), break an arm (twice), slice off a piece of gum over a tooth (twice), and sustain innumerable bruises, abrasions, bloodied body parts, split outer ears, ankle sprains, nail punctures, bee stings (several), hornet stings (27), digit crushings, near-blinding eye pokings, ass-over-teakettle head-to-head bike crashes, and some fairly significant falls out of trees. But I’m helicopter enough that they are still generally intact, so on average … perfect.

And finally, there’s the “mommy wars.” Mom versus mom. Team attachment vs team … not attachment? Working versus stay-at-home. Free-range versus helicopter. Organic versus conventional. Tiger versus panda. You know what? Pick a damned day. On some day or many days of my experience as a parent, I’ve been one of these mothers. I’ve attached and detached. I’ve worked and I’ve stayed at home, and I’ve stayed at home and worked at the same time (and there are these things called “weekends,” at the least). I’ve helicoptered, probably especially with our oldest (we’re thinking of letting our youngest get his own apartment now that he’s seven). And I’ve free-ranged (example: to a 5-year-old, a desperate waiting-in-the-checkout-line order to “go find me a large yellow onion in the produce department, stat!”). If we’re at war, it is a war within each of us, not among us, because we are not robots, consistently following our programmed parenting algorithms. We are what we need to be when we need to be it, and on average, most of us are probably as damned near close to perfect as we can get. Just like me.

[Image credit: Emily Willingham]